‘Well, if you need any help …’ Nicolas offers mildly.

Rachkovsky looks away from the barbecue and seems to weigh a thought up in his mind. ‘As it happens, I might. Are you serious?’

It’s the easiest thing in the world for Nicolas to double his stake of polite interest with an affirmative.

‘In that case, if you’re free on Tuesday, why don’t you stop by the office?’

Nicolas finds social gatherings like this hard work, but he persists in coming out of loyalty to Rachkovsky and because his work for the Third Section is now making up eighty per cent of his earnings. He gets cornered by Rachkovsky’s long-suffering, much-betrayed wife, Maria, who talks about the difficulty of finding a decent school for her children. Behind her, Nicolas can see her husband flirting with someone else’s wife.

Maria Rachkovskaia’s tragic, aged eyes frame the same coquettish question she always asks at this point. ‘And when are you going to bring this lovely girl of yours? I hope you know she’s always welcome.’

‘It’s early days, Maria Vassilievna,’ says Nicolas, using the polite patronymic that causes such confusion for Englishspeaking readers of Russian novels.

‘Early days?’ she replies, swatting Nicolas with her fan. ‘It must be nearly a year. Get on with it!’

Nicolas manages a weak smile, sips his beer, and thinks guiltily of Anya.

Everything about Anya is right, on paper, and he gets on well with her parents. Something about their cosmopolitanism and their effort to assimilate strikes a chord with him, but whenever they make lame excuses to leave the room and give the courting couple time alone, Nicolas feels strangely exhausted and struggles to find things to talk about. Saying goodbye, last Thursday, Anya pressed her head to his chest and stroked his lapel with her tiny fingers. It feels like, at nineteen, she’s just so young. Or, at twenty-seven, he’s so old. The world he sees in Anya’s eyes is one shorn of all the pain and strangeness that he knows to be the true complexion of reality. He feels paternal towards her, and can’t help contrasting those feelings with what he felt for Bessie, who always seemed to fit him like the adjacent piece of a jigsaw puzzle; at least, until she chucked him. The symptoms of his broken heart have a malarial tendency to recur whenever he’s feeling particularly low. Still he persists, hoping something in him will change, hoping that he will find a way to consolidate his respectability with marriage. At the same time, if there were a button that could make the whole Anya situation vanish, he’d probably press it.

*

IT’S A RELIEF to see Rachkovsky in his business clothes and back in the more appropriate context of his basement office.

‘Thanks for coming by,’ he says. ‘Sorry if I dumped on you rather at the weekend.’

‘Not at all,’ says Nicolas, but stops just short of saying: that’s what friends are for.